What you'll be doing

• Working part-time: The position is initially for two full-time days per week.
• Writing: To write both topical and static content for AppalachianTrail.com, LakeLanier.com, LakeAllatoona.com and others.
• Handling inquiries: The writer will be the point-person for the sites.
• Handling advertising requests: You'll earn a bonus for all advertising sold.
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Today is Halloween so it's a good time to addresses a scary topic.

After a baby-hiatus this summer, I've been back on the road again teaching a lot of Joomla and Drupal. I'm talking to a lot of end-users and finding that there's something really scary In our open source platforms.

No Upgrades? Your Customers See an Exit Door

I tweeted a while ago that a lot of people are migrating to Joomla and Drupal from the Vignette / OpenText system. Why? Because OpenText are dropping support for an old version and moving to the new version requires a major migration. People are using that opportunity to shop around. If they're going to have to rewrite their whole website, why not see if there's a better alternative out there? Every time there's a difficult upgrade, your customers seen an exit door.

The worst part of every class with Vignette users is explaining that neither Joomla or Drupal are better with upgrades. It's not comforting to explain to new users that they got out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Times Have Changed

Here's the thing: people's expectations have changed. This isn't 2005 when phones never updated and new Windows versions often required buying new computers.

In 2011, your phones, computers and tablets update automatically. In 2011, WordPress runs 15% of the web and its updates are like butter. In 2011, we all run on the cloud and we never even notice the updates. That's today's standard. Any system which doesn't provide an easy update path isn't living in the 2010's.

Conclusion

I hope that Joomla devs provide a smooth upgrade from 2.5 to 3.0 and that Drupal devs provide a smooth path from 7 to 8.

I fear a scary experience for the users and companies working with either platform if they don't.

Phew. Joomla! Explained is finally out.

If you've written a book, you know how I feel. Phrases like "piece of cake" and "walk in the park" aren't involved.

Why Is Writing a Book So Difficult (Particularly for Web People)?

1. Print. Oh man, the boot was on the other foot this time. If you're a web designer, you've had a requests like these: "I'd like the image to be 5.4 cm high"  "I have this pixel-perfect magazine ad that want translated into a website". I've been guilty in the past of making light fun of print designers who try to tackle website. Oh man, the boot was firmly on the other foot this time. I had a lot of ideas of how the book should be laid out from a tear-out handout to an almost-blank splash page for each chapter (an idea taken from Steve Krug). Now I was the noob. Everything was foreign from dealing with Word documents to formatting to image numbering. My editors did a great job of steering me gently away from my wackier ideas and producing a good output at the end. I now have a LOT more respect for print designers.
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2011 is turning out to be a pretty busy year and I've got some updates to mention in just about every area of my life.

Why the Updates?

It all starts from the same point: we're having a second little girl later this year. She's due in mid-August.

I naively thought that two babies wouldn't be much more work than one. I'm already wrong.

Over the last couple of weeks I've been trying to get a better handle on our business over at OSTraining.com. Since the launch early last years, things have been growing faster than my ability to analyze and understand it.

It's been a pretty sobering experience so far and I ended up experiencing some pretty eye-opening problems with all the tools out there?

First, I realised once and for all that the major payment gateways are really living in the 1990s when it comes to their websites. We use PayPal and Authorize.net  for payments and "wow!", they do not make it easy to do any analysis. GaragePay helped us to get the data into a usable format from PayPal (thanks to Kyle from PixelPraise for that suggestion) but I've not found a good tool yet for Authorize.

"Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
Yo Mos, what's gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?"
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, "You know what's gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever's happening with us"
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it's some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We (are) Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?"

This post has been a long time coming ... like almost everything on my blog these days :)

It's a rant of sorts and a little over the top, but it sums up what I've been thinking for a while.

During 2010, I've listened to presentations and read blogs and tweets where people have been talking about other Open Source projects as their rivals. The attitude manifests itself with comments like this:

• "Our CMS really needs to compete with and beat their CMS" or,
• "Our CMS is like wine and theirs is like Mountain Dew"

This has been going on in all directions: between Drupal and Joomla, WordPress and Drupal and also Joomla and WordPress.  

I think this attitude is misguided and here's why:

It's been far too long since I blogged.

I've got a few good excuses such as a baby, a business, a book, the OSM board and almost weekly trips around the U.S. However, I've also got a few good topics stored up, so expect more posts in the coming weeks.

First up, some thoughts on Molajo which is the shaping up to be the first widely-marketed Joomla distribution. Joomla's had few distros before such as Non-Profit Soapbox and the pre-packaged installs put out by template clubs and extensions like Virtuemart. However, those were never really presented as distributions and that's what the Molajo folk are aiming for.  They're expressly aiming to replicate Drupal's success with distros. I've spend about 50% of my time this year in the Drupal world, so I've a few thoughts on their pros and cons:

This might be the most expensive blog post I've ever written, but here goes ...

This week I was talking to a developer who sells open source products and their attitude was that they fight even single customer refund request..

I was pretty shocked - we always, always give refunds. Over at Open Source Training you can get a full refund at any point during your membership  - any point, even 5 months and 30 days into a 6 month membership.

I told the developer that we'd write up a list of our reasons to see if he was convinced:

A few weeks back I made a deliberately provocative post entitled "Even WordPress Usability Sucks" and ended with the suggestion that Joomla form a Usability team. It looks like one is starting to roll.

Congrats to Kyle from Joomlapraise, Chris from JoomlaJunkie and the others in the Joomla UX group on people.joomla.org for getting this started. Here's how you can help:

1) Join the people.joomla.org group and get involved.

2) Reply to Kyle's post today with an initial set of areas to work on.

3) Check out Marco Barbosa's Minima template. He's been working in this area for several months now and trying to imagine what the Joomla 1.7 admin area might look like. You can test his prototype at: http://marcobarbosa.com/minima/administrator/ Login with demo / demo. Leave feedback here.